Most of you have probably seen this before. It's the Kevin Carter photo of the little girl with a vulture behind her waiting on her to die. What do you think of this. I personally am disgusted by this and am glad he killed himself. I hope it hurt.

(27-01-2012 02:05 PM)ddrew Wrote: it sucks to see but... well it's pictures like that that reminds me of 2 things... God is a loving God... and nature's natural selection at work...

I dont' think this is natural selection. No 4 year old(ish) child can be expected to raise themselves in such harsh environments. Natural selection is a way of weeding out unneeded or recessive traits. IMO survival of the fittest doesn't apply to helpless children. That child might have had a doctorate one day. But we will never know.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.”

(27-01-2012 02:05 PM)ddrew Wrote: it sucks to see but... well it's pictures like that that reminds me of 2 things... God is a loving God... and nature's natural selection at work...

Natural selection only in the sense that humans can not evolve fast enough to keep up with climate change. "Survival of the fittest" is a simplistic, cruel, misguided, ultimately misleading statement regarding evolution.

Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.

(27-01-2012 01:21 PM)germanyt Wrote: I personally am disgusted by this and am glad he killed himself.

While I certainly can appreciate why he killed himself, I see no reason to be glad of it.

I am glad that the world is rid of the kind of person who would leave a dying child to be eaten by a vulture. The situation presented no danger to the photographer other than disease, maybe. I like to think I'd have risked catching AIDS to save her life. And very little effort would have been require to put this girl in your truck and drive her a few miles to civilization.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.”

(27-01-2012 01:21 PM)germanyt Wrote: Most of you have probably seen this before. It's the Kevin Carter photo of the little girl with a vulture behind her waiting on her to die. What do you think of this. I personally am disgusted by this and am glad he killed himself. I hope it hurt.

I have often heard photojournalists talk about not getting involved so as to maintain their objectivity. I've always thought it was misinterpreted by many of them. Like this guy if he didn't get help for that child.

Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.

João Silva, a Portuguese photojournalist based in South Africa who accompanied Carter to Sudan, gave a different version of events in an interview with Japanese journalist and writer Akio Fujiwara that was published in Fujiwara's book The Boy who Became a Postcard.

According to Silva, they (Carter and Silva) went to Sudan with the United Nations aboard Operation Lifeline Sudan and landed in Southern Sudan on March 11, 1993. The UN told them that they would take off again in 30 minutes (the time necessary to distribute food), so they ran around looking to take shots. The UN started to distribute corn and the women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. Silva went looking for guerrilla fighters, while Carter strayed no more than a few dozen feet from the plane.

Again according to Silva, Carter was quite shocked as it was the first time that he had seen a famine situation and so he took many shots of the children suffering from famine. Silva also started to take photos of children on the ground as if crying, which were not published. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane, so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the girl in the photo taken by Carter. A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos before chasing the bird away.

Two Spanish photographers who were in the same area at that time, José María Luis Arenzana and Luis Davilla, without knowing the photograph of Kevin Carter, took a picture in a similar situation. As recounted on several occasions, it was a feeding center, and the vultures came from a manure pit waste:
We took him and Pepe Arenzana to Ayod, where most of the time were in a feeding center where locals go. At one end of the enclosure, was a dump where waste and was pulling people to defecate. As these children are so weak and malnourished they are going head giving the impression that they are dead. As part of the fauna there are vultures go for these remains. So if you grab a telephoto crush the child's perspective in the foreground and background and it seems that the vultures will eat it, but that's an absolute hoax, perhaps the animal is 20 meters.

On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfontein Spruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning, aged 33. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:
"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners ... I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky.

A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels. ~ Albert Einstein

(27-01-2012 01:21 PM)germanyt Wrote: Most of you have probably seen this before. It's the Kevin Carter photo of the little girl with a vulture behind her waiting on her to die. What do you think of this. I personally am disgusted by this and am glad he killed himself. I hope it hurt.

I have often heard photojournalists talk about not getting involved so as to maintain their objectivity. I've always thought it was misinterpreted by many of them. Like this guy if he didn't get help for that child.

humanity > objective journalism

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.”